Melanoma accounts for only about 5 percent of skin cancers, but it's the most deadly. Until now, effective treatments for advanced melanoma patients have been few. That may be changing.
"Melanoma is one of the deadliest forms of skin cancer and the reason for that is if it's not caught early, when it is very curable, melanoma can spread throughout the body," Dr. Howard Kaufman of Rush University Medical Center in Chicago told television station WGN. "And once it does that, survival is often in the order of about six to nine months."
The response rate to current therapies that treat metastasized melanoma, including interleukin-2 and chemotherapy, is — at best — 15 percent.
The vaccine Kaufman and his colleagues have developed, called OncoVex, is injected directly into the lesion and kills cancer cells while leaving healthy cells intact.
OncoVex was developed to treat herpes, and researchers only discovered its anti-cancer properties when it was accidentally put into a laboratory dish of tumor cells.
The OncoVex study involved 50 patients with advanced melanoma who had been given a maximum of nine months to live. Of these 50, 16 percent of those given the vaccine recovered completely and have been disease-free for more than four years. The tumors of another 28 percent of patients were reduced in size by more than 50 percent. The overall survival rate after one year was 58 percent, and after two years was 52 percent.
"What really surprised and encouraged us was that the vaccine worked not just on the cells we injected, but on lesions in other parts of the body that we couldn't reach," Kaufman said in a statement. "In other words, the vaccine prompted an immune response that was circulated through the bloodstream to distant sites."
"Very few treatment options exist for patients with advanced melanoma, none of them satisfactory, which is why oncologists are so excited about the results we found in our Phase II study," Kaufman said.
The vaccine is now undergoing Phase III clinical trials. The tumors of 430 patients will be directly injected with the vaccine every two weeks for a maximum of 24 treatments. Researchers hope the drug will be fast-tracked for approval and available in five years.
According to the American Cancer Society, about 68,720 new melanomas were diagnosed in 2009, and about 8,650 people died from the disease.
© 2010 Newsmax. All rights reserved.
